Prince William Wants to Put This Kate Middleton Portrait Up in His Room

In 2012, Kate Middleton was presented with an official portrait by Paul Emsley, which was, uh . . . let’s just say it was not exactly unanimously embraced. One such critic, Tom Sutton-Smith, himself an artist in Scotland, was told by many of his friends that he could out-portrait Emsley. “When the official portrait went up, everyone who knows Tom said, ‘You can do better than that.’ So that was the challenge,” Glenys Andrews, Perthshire Open Studios chair and Sutton-Smith’s colleague, said.

And Sutton-Smith took the challenge, creating his own portrait of Kate from a picture of her taken shortly after Emsley’s portrait was released. His goal was to capture Kate’s “youthful spirit” because he felt she looked “serious” in Emsley’s, and “in all the photos one sees of her, she is smiling and laughing.” Kate is “kind of sparkly and I was trying to convey that in the eyes and mouth. Those are the hard bits to get right,” Sutton-Smith said.

And unlike the majority of Middleton-inspired art, Sutton-Smith’s work actually was shown to the subject herself. When William and Kate visited Scotland last week, Andrews showed them the portrait at an art exhibition held for the royal couple.

While Sutton-Smith said he was nervous about how it would be received, he is “pleased with the outcome and very happy with their reaction,” which he did not see in person but rather on a video recorded of the presentation. (“I had already made plans to be in Paris when we found out the Duke and Duchess would be coming,” he said. Dude, when Kate Middleton is coming to look at the portrait you painted of her, you cancel your trip to Paris.) According to Andrews, William exclaimed, “Wow, it’s brilliant! That’s going up in my room.” (We will note William was photographed drinking whiskey earlier in the day.) Meanwhile, Kate’s face, reportedly, “lit up.” “She was wowed by it,” Andrews said. “She reached out her arms to hold it and stared at it.” Um, this wording of Kate’s reaction sounds a little . . . muted, no? It’s like asking someone if their friend liked a cake and that person responding, “She tasted it!”

In any event, this now gives us hope that Kate will someday see our macraroni-and-glue re-creation of her Australia banana dress that we’ve been working on for weeks now.